By Vishwamithra –

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” ~ Nelson Mandela

Independent Ceylon’s first Cabinet consisted of some remarkable men. Except Prime minister DS Senanayake and Finance Minister JR Jayewardene, all others had higher studies completed in overseas universities. The two youngest Ministers were Dudley Senanayake, DS’s elder son, who held the portfolio of Agriculture and Lands, (during the State Council days this portfolio was held by DS himself) and JR Jayewardene, Minister of Finance. As for economic development of the country, both Agriculture and Lands and Finance were the most crucial Ministries. Having inherited an economy which was completely at the behest of the British colonial interests, Ceylon from 1948 onward had to adopt more indigenous-oriented policies. However, the Cabinet that DS appointed was one that was totally acceptable to the electorate in the context of academic qualifications, political and governance experience and social acceptability. In addition to these basic credentials, the Cabinet also included two Tamil gentlemen whose credentials were even better than the others. C Sunderalingam, Minister of Trade and Commerce, was a member of the Indian Civil Service first and later Ceylon Civil Service and C Sittampalam, Minister of Posts and Telecommunication, a member of the Ceylon Civil Service. What a Cabinet!

However, the introduction of Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948, which deprived citizenship to 11% of Ceylon’s population, which later became a vicarious cause for all Tamils, Northern and Central Province Estate Tamils, to combine together and make the cause for Tamils all over the island a battle-cry  for equality and Tamil Homeland. DS’s inner make-up was exposed and a political move intended for the expansion of the UNP’s power base in the Hill Country became a wider cause for all Tamils to bare open the racially prejudicial policies of Sinhalese. DS Senanayake who proclaimed that Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan, a Northern Tamil leader, as the most patriotic Ceylonese he had met, could not conceal his ethnic preferences. The term ‘Stateless Tamils’ entered into the Ceylonese political vocabulary after ‘Ceylon Citizenship Act’ of 1948.

DS Senanayake died in 1952 and just before his fatal horse ride on the Galleface Green, when he was in hospital for some other ailment, he indicated to his guests who called over to see him, as per KM de Silva’s biography of JR Jayewardene of Sri Lanka, that he wanted his son Dudley to succeed him as Prime Minister. A plot that was hatched inside a hospital room reaped its bountiful harvest in the weeks following DS’s demise. The main players were JR Jayewardene, Esmond Wickremesinghe (Ranil Wickremesinghe’s father) and LMD de Silva K.C., the then Chairman of the Lake House Group of News papers. The ‘Attygalle Inheritance’-flow of power continued- from father to son, from uncle to nephew and later after the dawn of the so-called ‘Common Man’s era, from husband to wife and mother to daughter and so on. This family legacy has been an unexpressed and un-articulated deterrent to the development and realization of the dreams and aspirations of the non-elite class.

DS, Dudley, Sir John and JRJ were all integral cogs and wheels of the machine known as the ‘Attygalle Inheritance’. Three sisters with their marriage to three of the most eligible men in Ceylon at the time ( John Kotelawala, Col T F Jayewardene and FR Senanayake) were significantly contributory in creating a family legacy of power that continued from 1947 up to 2022 (until Ranil Wickremasinghe was defeated by Anura Kumara Dissanayake). What materialized in the twenty first century as blatant nepotism around the Rajapaksa family had its roots in the early nineteen fifties, soon after the death of the ‘Father of the Nation’, DS Senanayake, our first Prime Minister. Continuation of such a wicked stream of power exchange was not checkmated until a boy from Thambuththegama Secondary School, a JVP die-hard and known Marxist turned political tables upside down. Yet that is to follow later.

The governing style of DS had been rather semi-autocratic, yet within the confines of democracy, shrewdly executed without causing any pain of heart to those who mattered. DS was not ‘feared’ the way R Premadasa was, but most reverently respected by his Cabinet and other UNP parliamentarians. But the policy he adopted in the matter of Upcountry Tamils which culminated in the introduction of the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 that made more than seven hundred thousand (700,000) Upcountry Estate Tamils ‘stateless’ was an outright discriminatory statute that remains to-date as one of the most shortsighted and dead harmful legislative enactments to the ethnic unity of Ceylon.

While on the one hand, Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 was instrumental in bringing all Tamil speaking population together as one family of men and women, on the other, it was fundamentally inhuman and ungrateful government-propelled act against a hardworking yet totally neglected segment whose day-to-day living was sub par. Soumiyamoorthi Thondaman, Leader of Ceylon Workers Congress, who was their unchallenged leader of five to six decades, had to wait until 1977 to be selected to Sri Lanka’s Cabinet of Ministers. Allegedly corrupt yet driving this population towards a better living conditions, the CWC and its Leader old Thondaman have placed their people on an equal level with their plantation management Periyadurais (PD) and Sinnadurais (SD). This sad chapter of our plantation labor too is part of our history.

Nevertheless, with the demise of DS in 1952, Dudley Senanayake became our Prime Minister and he showed that he was not ready to lead an emerging democracy in the twentieth century. He could not withstand the brutal political attacks hurled at him by the Trade Union cabal that was led by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), headed by NM Perera and his fellow leftists. The now famous Hartal bagged Dudley Senanayake, the country’s second Prime Minster, as its first victim, among others.

Sir John’s succession as Prime Minister led a government that practiced what was politically detrimental to the re-election of the UNP in the coming elections. By this time, SWRD Bandaranaike had already left the UNP and had his own party, Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Unlike Sir John, SWRD surrounded himself with some arch nationalists who sincerely believed that Sinhalese Buddhists were severely discriminated against (reverse discrimination) under the British powers and the succeeding UNP government. Focusing his election campaign on five pillars of the local population, Sanga (Buddhist clergy), Weda (indigenous medical practitioners), Guru (teachers), Govi (farmers) and Kamkaru (working class). Bandaranaike’s appeal was to the non-elites of Ceylon’s society.

Buttressed further by a demand for ‘Sinhala only in 24 hours’ SWRD could not have chosen to build a more politically savvy platform. Whatever social prism through which one chooses to examine the ’56 Revolution, it had within itself some long-lasting effects, both positively and negatively. More than a couple of generations of the ‘Children of the ’56 Revolution’ as Mervin de Silva, Dayan Jayatilleka’s father termed, have joined the stream of our population and almost all of them owe their present position in society to the ’56 Revolution.

On the other hand, the Sinhala Only Act of Bandaranaike has generated its nasty outcomes. Polarization of society along ethnic lines, hatred, anger, jealousies of incalculable degrees have all piled up against a society that was struggling to raise its head in an otherwise cruel globally significant economic circumstance. Ethnic factor alone has already accounted for many thousands of lives; many more are still missing and successive governments have failed even to give a valid and authentic number. Many more intangibles are still reappearing with no solace to those who are waiting for their children to come home. Military forces are still occupying some privately-owned land by Northern Tamils.

Free education launched as far back as 1943 has had no effect on the wisdom of our leaders. Free education may have produced tens of thousands of degree holders with paper qualification, but a profound sense of education associated with wisdom seems to have evaded our children and adults. All political slogans have come to  naught. The issue is yet waiting for a wiser ruler to resolve.

I give below a synopsis of the launch of free education in Ceylon:             

In 1942 a special committee was appointed to observe the education system and, among the suggestions, among others, that followed, the undermentioned played an important role:

1. Make available to all children a good education free of charge, so that education ceases to be a commodity purchasable only by the urban affluent.

2. Make national languages the media of instruction in place of English so that opportunities for higher education, lucrative employment open only to small number of the urban affluent, would become available to others as well.

3. Rationalize the school system so that educational provision is adequate, efficient and economical.

4. Ensure that every child is provided with instruction in the religion of his/her parents.

5. Protect teachers from exploitation by managers of schools.

6. Make adequate provision for adult education.

After independence, the number of schools and the literacy rate substantially increased. According to the Ministry of Statistics, today there are approximately ten thousand and twelve (10,012 public schools serving close to four million and thirty thousand one hundred and fifty seven (4,037,157) students, all around the island. In schools located in the rural areas, the situation still remains pathetic. Some of these schools have less than fifty to one hundred students, making them severely understaffed at all times. The teachers assigned to these schools are perennially waiting for a transfer and that makes education an unbelievably rare facility available for these children in the underprivileged areas. Remoteness of their location has made education even more remote than CWW Kannangara, the ‘father of free education’, imagined.

Nevertheless, there have been rare gems that have been discovered in these rural locations. These brightest of bright stars would have shone whether they attended Siyabalanduwa Secondary School or Royal College, Colombo, nobody would have had the ability to keep them suppressed for any significant amount of time. Our current President AKD is an example.

Education has been the key factor, that Ceylon, from the nineteen forties all the way up to the twenty first century, that has played a very critical role in shaping our society. While the first term of the UNP regime was coming to a certain end with the dawn of 1956, the country’s attention was drawn to  more cultural and religion-centric issues of Sinhalese Buddhism and Sinhala Language. Education as a whole was given step-motherly treatment. Political leaders of all parties chose a more accelerated pace to reach the zenith of power, Prime Minister-ship and other Cabinet positions. This indeed was a dispiriting commentary of a nation entrenched in an unwinnable sociopolitical and economic war after gaining Independence in 1948.

To be continued…

*The writer can be reached at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com